Mary Flannery O’connor

MARY FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer especially noted for 32 incisive short stories before a tragic death at the age of 39.

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Francis and Regina O'Connor. The family lived on Lafayette Square at 207 East Charlton Street in Savannah, adjacent to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, where Mary Flannery was baptized into the Catholic faith on April 12, 1925. She attended school at St. Vincent's grammar school, taught by the Sisters of Mercy from Ireland. She received national media attention at the age of five when she trained a chicken to walk backwards. The summers were often spent visiting her mother's family, the Clines, in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Because of financial difficulties with his real estate business, her father, who had developed health problems as well, took a federal job in Atlanta in 1938, when Mary Flannery was 13. However, settling in Atlanta proved difficult for the family, and Mary Flannery and her mother Regina Cline O'Connor moved to the mother's family home in Milledgeville in fall of the same year.

Her father's health continued to decline, and it was not until shortly before his death on February 1, 1941 that he was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosis, the same disease that would claim Flannery.

Following graduation from Peabody High School and the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, she began attending the State University of Iowa, where she began her writing career and introduced herself as Flannery. While in Iowa City, she attended Mass daily at St. Mary's Church; throughout her life, she remained true to her Catholic faith. During graduate school, her short story The Geranium was accepted for publication by Accent in 1946. She submitted her thesis in 1947, entitled The Geranium: a Collection of [Six] Short Stories, and received her Masters of Fine Arts degree on June 1, 1947.

Flannery O'Connor's writings offer deep insight on the fallen nature of mankind through original sin, but redemption through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952, achieved only a modest reception. However, she received critical acclaim and popular success with the 1955 publication of A Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of 10 short stories, the first story bearing the same name. A second novel, The Violent Bear it Away, was published in 1960. She attempted a third novel in 1962, Why Do the Heathen Rage, but was able to finish only the first chapter because of illness, leaving us with a short story of the same name.

Her writing career unfortunately was interrupted by crippling illness. It was in 1951, only four years following graduation, that she was diagnosed as having her father's condition, systemic lupus erythematosis. The advent of steroid therapy provided some relief, but progressive illness required her to return to Milledgeville. She and her mother moved to the family dairy farm known as Andalusia, 4 miles outside of Milledgeville. The next 13 years were marked by periods of intense writing interspersed by bouts of illness, until her death at the age of 39 on August 3, 1964.

A second collection of nine short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published post-humously in 1965. Judgement Day, a rewritten version of both The Geranium and the never-published An Exile in the East, was the last story Flannery ever wrote, and served as the last story in the collection. Everything That Rises Must Converge included three stories that won her three first prizes in the O'Henry awards: Greenleaf in 1957, Everything that Rises must Converge in 1963, and Revelation in 1965.

In 1971 her publisher Robert Giroux released 31 of her short stories in The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, which won the National Book Award in 1972. A thirty-second short story, An Afternoon in the Woods, a rewritten version of one of her first stories, was published in The Library of America Series in 1988.

Her lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald published her essays in Mystery and Manners in 1969, and Sally Fitzgerald released a collection of her letters in A Habit of Being in 1979. Some of her essays include The Fiction Writer and His Country, The Church and the Fiction Writer, The Regional Writer, The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South, and Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann. A few selections from her essays and letters are included here to offer a glimpse of her philosopy on life and writing.

LMH

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